A couple of weeks ago, the Ur-Guru helped me reinstall my main computer, Enheduanna. (Alas, I can’t blame the hiatus in backup reminders on that, but I do have to admit that this tour-guide business leaves me a lot less time for blogging.) One of the things he pointed out in the course of installing software was that I could save myself time on the next reinstall if I backed up my complete Firefox environment and not just my bookmarks, and he introduced me to the Firefox Environment Backup Extension, or FEBE, by Chuck Baker. (The second link goes to the Firefox add-ons page.)

I don’t use Firefox to save passwords—or I didn’t, much, until recently—but I rely on several Firefox extensions, like the All in One Sidebar, NoScript, Video DownloadHelper, IE Tab, Screengrab, and ColorZilla—not to mention Delicious Bookmarks for Firefox.

FEBE lets you back up your add-ons an other extensions, your bookmarks, and a whole lot more. You can back up your themes, if you use custom themes for Firefox (I stopped bothering a while ago; keeping up with themes for WordPress is enough trouble), your preferences, usernames and passwords, search plugins, history, permissions, cookies…the list goes on. You can even opt to back up a copy of the FEBE extension in your backup directory.

FEBE backs up on a schedule—daily, weekly, or monthly—or at startup or shutdown of Firefox. The Ur-Guru’s recommendation is a weekly backup. For this initial phase where I’m rebuilding cookies and form-fill data, daily might be better, but I’m not likely to lose too much if I miss a week.

If you have a Box.net account, you can use FEBE to back up your Firefox environment online. The free account is plenty big enough to hold a Firefox backup.

Backing up with FEBE is very simple. Restoring is a little trickier. While it looks as though you can just select Tools | FEBE | Restore | Restore Profile from the Menu bar, you can’t restore the profile you’re using while using that profile in Firefox. (Well, it does make sense if you think about it.) Instead you have to go through a somewhat more complex process in order to either create a new profile or overwrite the existing profile from outside of Firefox.

1. Close Firefox if open.
2. Browse to your backup destination directory.
3. Rename your profile backup file to a zip file. Example: Rename “profile{default}.fbu” to “profile{default}.zip”.
4. Open the renamed file and extract it to your Firefox profile folder. In your profiles folder you will see one or more individual profile folders named something like “pqf85hp8.default” or “y3f5nnr4.Chuck”. The first part of the name is a random string of characters and the last part is the name of the profile you want to restore. You want to extract the zip file into the individual profile directory. If asked, you do want to replace existing files during the extraction.

This seems, at first glance, a bit like walking on water, but that’s really only because the paths and folder names are such gibberish. I followed the directions and it worked perfectly. When I restarted Firefox less than 5 minutes later, it even restored my last session.

If I wanted to, I could also use FEBE to replicate my Firefox setup on my other two computers, Mena and Star, and I may yet do that.

There’s a support forum for help with problems.

I definitely recommend this tool, but perhaps not for the completely non-technical.

For those people, there’s MozBackup by Pavel Cvrcek. (Don’t ask me how to pronounce that. I thought “Goetsch” was difficult.) It, too, backs up your extensions, bookmarks, cookies, form fill details, passwords, certificates, and settings—not just for Firefox, but also for Thunderbird and other Mozilla software. It will even back up files it doesn’t recognize, including those created by FEBE.

To run MozBackup, you need to shut down Firefox and all other Mozilla programs. Then run MozBackup, which will give you the choice to either back up or restore a profile, and list the programs whose profiles you can back up (or restore). My choices are Firefox and “portable applications,” whatever that means. I chose Firefox and the default (only) profile, backed it up to my F drive, and then restored it. Quick and easy. The only down side is that there’s no scheduler, so you have to remember to run the backups yourself. But if you use Thunderbird as well as Firefox, I’d definitely recommend it.

With more and more of our computing experiences taking place “in the cloud,” backups for our browsers are becoming more important. And even though I’ve started keeping most of my bookmarks on Delicious, I’ve also “pimped out” Firefox with extensions I didn’t use a few years ago. (Hope that doesn’t leave the e-mail version of this reminder stuck in the spam filters.)

FEBE works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. MozBackup is Windows only. Both are completely free.

What about the Safari, Opera, and MSIE users out there? Do you have a favorite browser backup tool? Leave a comment and let us know, or send me a guest post: sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com.

Making your hard drives more secure seems to be the trendy thing to do these days. Within the past couple of months, I’ve been contacted about two similar products for protecting your external hard drives from fire and water—not to mention spilled coffee. I haven’t had the chance to test either product myself, so I can’t give you a firsthand account, but it seemed worth mentioning them in case fire hazards or water hazards are particularly high in your office.

The first is the MediaVault HD, which I first heard about in a LinkedIn question from Chuck Fetta of Office Furniture Warehouse asking for feedback from IT professionals. MediaVault’s main claim to fame is that it’s fireproof (up to a point, the point in fact being a UL 125°F 1 Hour rating), semi-waterproof (it will probably survive your sprinkler system), and locks to reduce the risk of theft (but you’re not supposed to bolt it down).

The IT professionals consulted suggested that online or other off-site backup was almost certain to be better protection against disasters (including fires) and that as an anti-theft device, the MediaVault didn’t look too impressive. I have to agree with that last objection. I have friends who had their safe stolen because it wasn’t built into their wall or floor. The MediaVault just isn’t large or heavy enough to deter thieves, even the casual sort who didn’t come prepared with a dolly and a moving truck.

The Ur-Guru also pointed out that any USB port was likely to melt off immediately in a fire (perhaps causing interesting electrical problems to your drives and your data). The backup advantage of leaving the device connected is countered by the security disadvantage. Better to get a genuine fireproof safe (the built-in kind that will still be there when nothing is left of your house but cinders) and put your external drives there. Of course, that does require an extra step: remembering to take the drives out of the safe to make the backups and put them back into the safe for storage.

The MediaVault HD ships with Seagate drives and Genie Backup Manager Pro. This is another product I’ve heard of but never used. You can get it with or without disaster recovery. Somewhere in my copious spare time, I’ll have to give it a try, though the Ur-Guru might not forgive me if I start cluttering up the machine he’s been spending the weekend reinstalling.

It seemed hardly a moment after the LinkedIn discussion of MediaVault that I heard from Brett Callow about ioSafe, but it was actually a month or so. Brett started out by asking for a link, as many companies do. I gave him the same answer I give everyone: “Why not write a guest post?” I did have to warn him that he’d have to disclose the fact that ioSafe is paying him to talk up their product, even though he’s not one of their employees. This is what he sent me.

Where should you keep your backups?

Backing up to an external hard drive is an easy and reasonably economical way to protect your data against loss due to computer failure — but it will not protect your data against disasters. Should you be unlucky enough to have a fire, chances are that both your computer and external drive will be toast. (And, if the flames don’t get it, the water from the fire department’s hoses almost certainly will!)

So, how can you minimize the risks? One solution would be to store your drive in a waterproof and fireproof safe when it’s not in use or to keep the drive at somebody else’s house. A much better solution, however, is to use more than one best-in-class solution to protect your data.

ioSafe makes a range of fireproof and waterproof drives which provide rock-solid protection for your critical data. The ioSafe Solo range are waterproof to 10 feet for 3 days and can withstand temperatures up to 1550°F for 30 minutes. The Solo can even be bolted to the floor to make theft more difficult. In short, it provides the best possible protection for data. Even if everything else in your house is lost to a disaster, at least your backups will still be safe and secure. With prices starting at $149.99 for a 500 GB model, ioSafes are a bit more expensive than other drives, but not by much. And, if you really value your data, the extra bucks are certainly money well spent.

But don’t stop there. Every mechanical device — hard drives included — will eventually fail. Consequently, you should be keeping your data in more than one spot. Unless you have an exceptionally large amount of data, the easiest way to do that is to use an online backup service. When choosing a service provider, don’t simply go with the cheapest option. Shop around, do some research and choose a well-established company. (A startup may offer you the best deal, but will they still be around in a week, month or year from now?)

By keeping more than one backup and keeping the backups in different locations, you’ll be protecting your data against pretty much every eventuality.

For more information about ioSafe, visit the company website.

This was a bit more of a sales pitch than I’d hoped for, paid post or not. Examination of the specs on the ioSafe site does, however, suggest that it’s likely to provide better protection against fire, water, and theft, than the MediaVault, and the price is not that much higher than for an ordinary external hard drive. If you’re prone to spilling your coffee, it might not be a bad investment.

But if you’re really concerned about fires and floods, you’re going to need more serious protection than this.

Backup bookmarks for June 3rd through June 6th:

• Paragon Snapshot for Mac OS X - disk backup software -
• Tip: Double-up the backups instead of backing up the backups. - MacFixIt -
• 3 great ways to back up your Windows hard drive | The Download Blog - Download.com -

In the course of investigating Memeo for last week’s Backup Reminder, I discovered I had a problem. I’d been using Memeo to back up my F drive, Freya (a Seagate FreeAgent Go USB drive) to my L drive, Lachesis (a Buffalo LinkStation Mini). However, I was not letting Memeo run in the background, because I had previously had problems with that. Memeo sends out little warnings if you turn its background agent off, but I never paid much attention. What with needing to see whether my version of Memeo would back up from a network drive, however, I opened it up, checked it out, and thought maybe I should investigate the state of the backups.

I discovered that there were some recent files—and whole folders—that had not been backed up. This puzzled me, so I ran the backup verification to update things, but somehow it didn’t seem to work. I tried deleting that backup routine and re-creating it, yet still, the size of the backup didn’t match the size of the directories I was backing up.

Baffled, I decided to try setting up the backup job in Titan Backup instead. This time all the files got copied—except a few that were corrupt. But it took a long time. And it still takes a long time every morning, even though there aren’t that many new files on the F drive.

In the midst of all this, I got a message headlined “Important Information about Titan Backup.”

Dear Titan Backup user,

We would like to inform you of some important changes to Titan Backup.

GFI Software has been working with Titan for some time and has made significant investments in the technology, which it has now re-launched under GFI. GFI will continue making major investments in this technology.

We would like to inform you that GFI Backup 2009 – Home Edition has now been launched. This version is being offered as full-featured FREEWARE for PC home users.

GFI Backup has retained all the functionality you are accustomed to in Titan Backup and also includes additional feature and improvements*. We invite you to try out GFI Backup 2009 – Home Edition, which you can download from: http://www.gfi.com/backup-hm.

Please note that you cannot back up with the Titan Backup version and restore with the GFI version. Also, you cannot import your settings from Titan Backup to GFI Backup, as there have been major changes to the configuration file formats.

You therefore need to install GFI Backup and reconfigure, as follows: Download and use GFI Backup 2009 – Home Edition, and run a new back up of your existing files, re-creating your backup and synchronization tasks as needed. We highly recommend this option.

“Well!” I thought to myself. “Something is definitely going on here.” So I downloaded GFI Backup 2009, but also decided to ask Flavius Saracut, my contact at Titan/Neobyte, what was up.

Flavius explained that GFI had been working with Titan for some time and made “significant investments in the technology,” and then pretty much recapitulated the information I’d already received from the sales team. I pressed him for more details. First, why make a previously paid product available for free?

At GFI Software, we believe that in hard economic times, vendors should work both with their channel partners and companies in general to assist them in sustaining their business until the economy bounces back. Apart from ensuring that we offer the best pricing possible to benefit small and medium-sized businesses, without scrimping on product quality and performance, we are also launching a number of initiatives to do something TANGIBLE to help.

As part of this, we have launched a We Care program and our first initiatives include:

• The release of the full-featured Freeware version of GFI LANguard. Using the Freeware version, companies can scan up to five IPs for free using the product’s full feature set — no restrictions whatsoever.
• The launch of a freeware backup tool for home users: GFI Backup – Home Edition.

That’s a laudable motive—even though I’d guess that neither product was a big money-maker in the first place. I’m always in favor of good, free tools.

My second question was about the differences between the two products. Despite the name change, the interfaces proved pretty much identical:

Titan Task Pane.

GFI Task Pane. (Advanced view would show same tree.)

Flavius kindly listed the following improved features in GFI Backup 2009 – Home Edition:

• No need to be logged on to the machine for the backups to take place
• Improved memory management
• Improved logging mechanism, status product messaging and task view
• On-demand check for product updates from GFI
• Support for Windows 7 RC build 7100
• Enhanced execution speed for tasks that include many files
• Single plug-in restore options
• Internationalization support for custom time and date formats.

So I set up the identical backup job and compared the two jobs. Interestingly, GFI objected to a few files on the F drive that Titan had not. And while it appeared to be slightly faster at completing the initial backup, the later incremental backups actually appeared to be slower than they were with Titan.

GFI Backup 2009 is easy to use and fairly versatile. It has a good feature set for a free product. But it doesn’t seem to be ideal for copying data from an external USB drive onto a NAS drive, for some reason. I’m not sure what the bottleneck is there, but its search for changed files seems slower than those performed by Karen’s Replicator and SyncBack and by Memeo. I much suspect that after the reinstall (which the Ur-Guru, who arrives for his annual visit today, has promised to help me with), I will go back to using Memeo to back up the F drive.

Nevertheless, GFI has some features I really like, and its speed is considerably better when copying from an internal to an external drive. For one thing, it handles both backup and sync. It also lets you do either incremental, differential, or “stacked” backups (the last take up both the most time and the most space, but save several complete versions of all your files). You can compress or encrypt your backups (either or both). And you can schedule the backup to run on Windows shutdown instead of Windows startup. This is a much more logical time to back up your machine, and also less likely to fill you with impatience while you wait for your backups to finish so you can actually start using your computer.

So if you’re looking for a good free file backup tool, check it out.

Backup bookmarks for May 23rd through June 2nd:

• Iomega Offers New Triple-interface Portable Hard Drives - Business Center - PC World -
• Data backup service leads to recovery of stolen laptop | Security - CNET News -
• Should you use NAS as the target for disk backup and recovery? :: SearchStorage.com.au -
• Use of backup devices will save sanity | NewsChief.com | News Chief | Winter Haven, FL -
• How to back up e-mail to an online account | Webware - CNET -